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Thursday, March 26, 2009

To catch you up: John Dupuis almost pulled me away from my fishing with his question about how one would cite from Twitter...in my last post I puzzled through (for myself at least) how I might cite an individual tweet.

But the tricky part of John's question remained:

what about when the cited message (cheats) actually spans several tweets? such as the 4 part Twitter message that John cobbled together for his readers but which we can hopefully see with a kwout:

Even combined I still see these as a part of a blog-type online periodical?

So, the quote John "cobbled" was from the ?online periodical? titled Clay Shirky (cshirky) on Twitter.

Because the tweets are consecutive and all published on the same day at practically the same time could they be considered to be pages of that day's issue of that periodical? If so, remember that a 'page' specification would be cited in-text rather than in the reference.

Although Twitter posts are named with digits, they are not consecutive and they are large so using those digits as page numbers would be cumbersome and confusing to readers (eg /status/1362459269 ; 1362458547 ; 1362458174 ; 1362457866).

Could we use the date/time of publication as be a page reference? (with this I worry that the time/date we see at Twitter might depend on our timezone?)

Perhaps it is even funnier that I didn't stop fishing? Still the realm went down for maintenance so I'm up late now because I simply must puzzle towards an answer, even if just for myself, or else BURST :P

Well an answer about citing Twitter posts, not about doing it with Zotero or Endnote - are they better at such things than Refworks?

Stable URL: each Tweet is followed (usually?/always? in italics) by when and from where it was posted... and the when is a hyperlink to the stable URL. In the following kwouted example, hover over the time/date (now this is odd, does it say 6:00 AM Mar 20th for you?) to see the tweet's URL is http://twitter.com/dupuisj/status/1356028444

What do you think of Kwout's answer to the title question? Beads suggests the same: That the title of a HTML web page can be taken from the <TITLE> element of that page (which displays in the browser's Title Bar).

However, do you note that the <TITLE> Twitter creates (and Kwout uses) for an individual post begins "Twitter / authorname:" and continues with, logically, the first few words of the post ? If we use that as the individual post title and consider the collection of an author's tweets to be the blog/periodical that Twitter <TITLE>s, for example: John Dupuis (dupuisj) on Twitter ? Then citing Twitter posts as if from a blog would result in a cumbersome reference like:

Perhaps <TITLE> serves multiple functions and different ones for different websites? [Can someone send some examples?]. In this case Twitter's <TITLE> for an individual post appears to combine a post title sensibly taken from the first few words of the post with a reasonable periodical title? Thus:

Still I doubt either of those questions in any way stumped John. His question I am guessing is "how do you cite a Twitter message that spans multiple tweets?" and I think my puzzling on this should become a new post ...